Rosie O’Donnell took the risk of briefly returning to the United States, she revealed in a new interview.
O’Donnell, 63, fled the country to Ireland last January to escape America under Donald Trump. She told Chris Cuomo on the SiriusXM show Cuomo Mornings that she “was recently home for two weeks, and I did not really tell anyone.” The former TV host said she “wanted to see how hard it would be for me to get in and out of the country,” so she “went to see my family.”
“I wanted to feel what it felt like. I wanted to hold my children again. And I hadn’t been home in over a year,” she added. While O’Donnell brought her youngest child, 12-year-old Clay, to Ireland, she left her adult children Parker, Chelsea, Blake, and Vivienne behind.
“I was in New York for the last two weeks, and I have to tell you, it feels like a very different country, a very different place to me,” she added. “Because for a year, I haven’t been watching the news. I haven’t been watching American culture television.”
Rosie O’Donnell fled to Ireland after Trump won the presidency. Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
O’Donnell’s long-running feud with Trump pre-dates the presidency. The two traded blows during and after her time on The View in 2006, when she rejected the idea that Trump should be the “moral authority” on anything, considering his own sordid background.
Since then, Trump has consistently made O’Donnell a target of verbal attacks, threatening in July that he was considering “taking away her citizenship.” O’Donnell called Trump “King Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan” and “a dangerous old soulless man with dementia” in response.
Despite being unafraid to trade insults with the president, O’Donnell was adamant that she did not want to live in the country while he was in power. In October, she told Australia’s Daily Telegraph that she was close to obtaining Irish citizenship. “It will be good to have my Irish citizenship, especially since Trump keeps threatening to take away mine,” she said at the time.
Trump has repeatedly attacked the comedian and threatened her citizenship for criticizing him. Alex Wong/Getty Images
O’Donnell plans to return to the U.S. again soon, she revealed Friday: “I also wanted to make sure that it was safe for me before I brought my daughter this summer, where we plan to spend the summer time off from her schooling here with my family.”
She continued, “I’m in a place where celebrity worship does not exist. I’ve been in a place where there’s more balance to the news, there’s more balance to life.” Her latest secret visit to New York hasn’t changed her mind at all, she said—in fact, it made her more sure that she’d made the right choice. “I felt the United States in a completely different way than I ever had before I left.”
“I think I did what I needed to do to save myself, my child, and my sanity,” she added. “And I’m very happy that I’m not in the midst of it there, because the energy that I felt while I was in the United States was, if I can use the most simple word I can think of, it was scary.”
She concluded, “There’s a feeling that something is really wrong, and nobody is doing anything about it.”
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